A friend to women? Pope Francis, left, and Belgium’s Queen Mathilde, exchange a gift during a private audience at the Vatican.
Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AP

Just a few days before the second anniversary of his election, Pope Francis shows all the signs of being a cottage industry. A quick search on Amazon reveals 3,483 Pope Francis-related titles, ranging from the in-depth, such as Austen Ivereigh’s The Great Reformer, to a title somewhat jarring for a pope who is no friend to capitalism, Lead With Humility: 12 Leadership Lessons from Pope Francis, doubtlessly intended to the more merciful among your CEO friends. Joining the growing pile is the latest book from historian and journalist Garry Wills, The Future of the Catholic Church With Pope Francis.

The title is misleading. Wills barely mentions the pope in the body of the book, only treating him seriously in the introduction. “Pope Francis heartens some Catholics and frightens others,” he writes, “both for the same reason, the prospect of change.” From there, Wills focuses neither on the pope nor on the future of the church, but rather on its history, and specifically on the many ways in which the church has erred, backtracked, prevaricated, and groaningly inched its way forward into the modern age. The church, Wills argues, may act like it never changes. But in the pages of this book, he shows us that it can.

Several of Wills’s previous books, particularly Why I Am a Catholic and Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, have explored similar territory. Wills’s historical chops are on vivid display in his new title: he can zip from the church’s distortion of the stories of early martyrs to contemporary battles over the use of Latin in liturgy. For those interested in Catholicism but lacking a theology degree, Wills’s work can serve as a decent introduction. He writes for a wide audience of sceptics, doubters, and questioners. However, those who the philosopher Charles Taylor recently referred to as “dwellers” – believers who disdain anyone disagreeing with church teaching – may not appreciate all of Wills’s zingers about the church’s history.

Wills defines his task in section headings. He traces the “coming and going” of Latin, of the church as a monarchy, its history of antisemitism, arguments over natural law, and the history of the sacrament of confession. In each, Wills confronts the church’s long history of reversals: its mostly fictitious story of Peter’s appointment as the “first pope”, the invention of early martyrs, its shift from a monarchical model to what will hopefully be a more democratic model under Pope Francis, who encourages Catholics to see him as primus inter pares – first among equals.

But Wills, a former Jesuit, is quite critical of the modern church. Pope John Paul II, for example, “created a huge army of ecclesiastical yes-men” when he upheld church teaching on contraception in the face of the Aids epidemic. On the failure of the bishops to punish priests guilty of sexual abuse, Wills asks, “How could men trained in submission as apparatchiks of Rome muster the wisdom, empathy and resolution to face such an issue?” Wills also disagrees with church teaching on life beginning at the moment of conception, using history and science to illustrate their distortions.

Wills also disagrees with the church on the issue of women’s ordination. He lays the blame on John Paul II, who declared women’s ordination a definitively closed issue, and, according to Wills, saw women only as “martyrs, virgins, and mothers”. Wills sees in Pope Francis the possibility of a shift in thinking about women. That remains to be seen, as Pope Francis has referred to female theologians as “strawberries on the cake”, and labelled childless women “selfish”. These are not encouraging signs.

Wills’s strongest chapter appears near the end of the book, when he traces the history of confession. Wills convincingly argues that the sacrament has been abused, that Jesus never intended forgiveness to be reserved for church authorities. “Forgiving,” he writes, “is not something reserved to an order of priests who did not yet exist. It is a part of every Christian life.”

Pope Francis seems to agree. He once said that “the confessional is not a torture chamber”. That seems a sign that he wants to move the church in a more inclusive direction. It greatly needs the improvement. Saint Augustine referred to the church and its people as corpus mixtum: a mixed body, both sinful and holy, from its individuals on up to its institutions. Yet for all of the enthusiasm about Pope Francis’s promise of reform, and all of Wills’s willingness to pry open the sinfulness of the church the Pope leads, it is rather too early to tell if the institution itself is ready to embrace that kind of humility.

The Future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis is published by Viking Press USA, and is available in the UK as an ebook